Simple Ways to Track Your Twitter Engagement

I have a lot of friends in real life who like to ask me about Twitter and how on earth I gained so many followers. What I always say is, you have to keep your audience Engaged.

What this means is that you have to interact with others, and provide content that people can comment and interact on. Phrase things in a way that can create conversation and be retweeted. Sure I have the random odd tidbits of my life on my timeline, but often those are the things that don’t keep an audience. Nobody needs to know how your day at work is sucking, unless you can tell them a funny story.

Follower number does not necessarily mean that people are actually paying attention to what you are saying. Often they are just people who want you to follow them back or bots. I only follow people who I want to interact with and provide interesting and original content and I hope that people do the same. I am actually the crazy person who goes through my followers lists and cleans out bots myself from time to time. If you see my follower number drop from time to time that’s probably the reason.

While hashtags are a good way to gain followers and engage with people of similar interests it sometimes leads to a ton of people who aren’t really engaged. Most of the time they are just people who just want followers, so don’t overdo the hash tagging, I find twitter posts with too many hashtags sort of annoying and might warrant me to unfollow you.

So..Here are some simple ways to check how you are doing.

1. How are people replying to my posts? A really easy way to check how you are doing is just to self-analyze your mentions. You don’t need a service to tell you who’s talking to you. Take a look at who’s replying to you. Is it just a few people over and over? Is it only people I know in real life? Are these only mentions of people you’ve talked to first? If you answered yes to those questions maybe you should look at changing your content to appeal to a larger audience.2. Type your username in the search

This will show you all the mentions of your name throughout the twitterverse. It’s different from the mentions column in that it also shows your own posts. It also shows when people retweeted you. If the search results just show a bunch of yourself talking it might mean that you might not be engaging others very well. If it’s just a bunch of you and your best friend talking back and forth you might want to rethink things as well. Note: This only works when you’re searching yourself while signed in on your own account.

3. Check Services Like Klout There are a ton of services like Klout out there that analyze your twitter engagement for you. It’s a quick and easy way to check how you are doing across all social networks, although it can be slightly confusing and only seems to analyze my twitter feed. It gives you a score out of 100 on how you are doing and analyzes things such as your True Reach which is how many people you are actually reaching out of all your followers. I’d say it’s usually around 50% of your followers, no matter how famous you are. If it’s any lower you might want to clean out your followers for bots. You can also check what topics you talk the most about. If there is something on there that you don’t want to be known for than maybe you should stop talking about it.

Another cool thing I like to check on Klout is my style. It tells you what kind of person you are whether a celebrity or a specialist in something. You can also guage by this what sort of areas you might need to work on in order to get the title you want to have.

I’m not a celebrity, just a normal little asian girl with a bit of an ego and a decent following. If I can do it, you can too.

Remember Twitter followers are just a number. Too many people/businesses become too obsessed with that number. What’s the point of a high number if no one’s actually listening? Engage Engage Engage